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Creditors

Published Wednesday 1 October 2008 at 18:55 by Jason Best

You don’t have to put Strindberg into contemporary dress to prove that he remains shockingly modern.

Alan Rickman’s Donmar staging of the little-seen Creditors may be set in a Swedish resort hotel room in the year of the play’s composition, 1888, but it could just as easily be taking place in Albee’s sixties America or Fassbinder’s seventies Germany or, indeed, 21st century London - anywhere, in fact, where people in unhappy relationships torment one another.

Strindberg presents us with three people writhing in coils of love, jealousy and revenge. Tom Burke’s artist Adolf, creatively and sexually insecure, is awaiting the return to the hotel of his writer wife, Anna Chancellor’s brazenly confident Tekla.

In her absence, Owen Teale’s insinuating fellow guest, Gustav, has been blandly offering Adolf advice on his relationship.

It’s clear from the outset, however, that the apparently disinterested outsider has more at stake here than he lets on, and his agenda becomes apparent when he tells the younger man to give up sex with his wife.

The moment gets a big, half embarrassed laugh from the Donmar audience. Indeed, Rickman’s assured direction reveals, without overplaying it, the dark comedy that runs beneath the play’s surface.

Yet in a staging that is as brisk and clear as the Scandinavian lines of Ben Stones’s striking, all white set, Rickman and his impressive cast also expose the drama’s terrifyingly bleak view of human relationships.

You could hardly claim that Rickman’s production and David Greig’s new version amount to a feminist re-reading of the play, but without exactly overturning Strindberg’s reputation for misogyny they do present us with a far more balanced war of the sexes than you might expect.

As husband and wife lacerate each other, goaded by Teale’s vindictive Gustav, both genders share equally in the pain.

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